


Nice Men

by DWEmma



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars: Bloodline - Claudia Gray
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 14:53:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8894926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DWEmma/pseuds/DWEmma
Summary: After being rescued from execution on his home planet, Ransolm Casterfo has just spent the last ten years running a bar that doubles as a resistance outpost in an outer world. He hasn't seen Leia since the day he was sentenced. But a marriage ending fight over her son causes her to need to personally check in on the outpost.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spookykingdomstarlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/gifts).



_“This is all your fault, you know.”_

_“What do you mean?”_

_“Your genetics. Your father. He was a monster and now our son is a monster. This wouldn’t have happened to my child if it weren’t for you.”_

_“You know what, Han?”_

_“What?”_

_“You’re not a nice man. You never were ‘nice men’.”_

_“That’s because you never deserved nice, Princess. You got what you deserved. And now we both get what we deserve.”_

 

_******_

 

Ransolm Casterfo sighed, as he locked up the bar doors and faced the mess that needed cleaning before he could go home. _How did I fall so far?_ But after the Resistance freed him from the cell he had spent the better part of a year in, they dumped him on this forceforsaken world without a penny to his name, or a name to his name for that matter. Apparently he was trusted enough to be freed a mere 3 days before his execution was scheduled, but not trusted enough to be allowed to join the resistance, other than as a recruiter and barkeep for one of their more obscure bases. If you could really call the hidden room in a dirty watering hole a base. 

But beggars can’t be choosers, he supposed, and the homespun corse fabric of his tunic might not be the top of the line Lashaa silk he had been used to, but he could feel the blood pumping through his veins, and he was well fed and comfortable. And he supposed there were some benefits of never having to attend meetings that went over things he already understood or writing memos. Though if things had gone differently, if he had made different choices, things could have been better for most people. 

He poured himself a shot of Dragonjuice, and gulped it all down. He was proud of never drinking while on the job, to keep his wits about him. But he also took pride in never going to sleep sober, to keep his wits about him. He began to wipe down the counters and wash the glasses left behind by the various resistance fighters and local inebriates when he heard the door unlocking from the outside. Keys were only given to very high ranking resistance members, as to assure the security of the site. He ran through the list of keyholders, realized that none would be even in this solar system, and pulled out the blaster that he kept under the bar for emergencies. He then pressed himself behind the doorframe that lead back to the small kitchen, and waited. 

But instead of a team of New Republic soldiers banging down the door as he expected, he found himself with his blaster pointed at the woman for whom he had ruined his career, the woman who had saved his life: Former Senator Leia Organa Solo. 

“Senator Solo,” he said, putting down his blaster. 

“Senator Casterfo,” she said. 

“Not Senator any more,” he said. “Nor Casterfo. Call me Courts Crescentlast. Everyone does.” 

“No, I don’t think I’ll be doing that.” 

“Well at least lock the door after yourself if you’re going to be using my real name. What would the neighbors think, Senator Solo?” 

“It’s not Senator any more. Not for a long time. And I’m not so sure about the Solo, either.” 

He nodded, pulled out a fresh glass, and poured each of them a tall glass of Dragonjuice, and motioned for her to sit at the bar. She turned around, locked the door, and walked through the sad space with all the grace and beauty of a princess walking down a red carpet. Then she took the glass, held it up to click against his, and downed the whole thing in a few rapid gulps. She shook her face, and grimaced. 

“Do you have anything behind that bar that doesn’t taste like my husband’s lips?” 

Casterfo was shocked by her crudeness, but then amazed that he still had the capacity to be shocked after spending 10 years behind a bar. But there was something so wrong about hearing such baseness from the mouth of someone so regal. He quickly recovered, so she wouldn’t feel uncomfortable and retreat into herself. 

“I don’t know,” he said, “How often was he inebriated, and how wide were his tastes?” But then he rummaged behind the bar for just the right bottle. He took her glass, and poured it below the bar. He handed her the glass. “Now close your eyes and take a sip,” he said. 

She raised an eyebrow at him, but then acquiesced. The glass found her lips, and she let out a little moan. “But how could you find Alderaan Ruge Liqueur?”

“I didn’t. But some men came through here with this bottle, swearing up and down that they’d found something that tastes just like it. As they got drunk in my bar on their own bottle, I took the chance to create a policy against that, and swiped the bottle, just in case.” 

“Just in case of what, Senator Casterfo?” 

Ransolm realized that he should find her insistence on using his lost title insulting, or at the very least, irritating. But he felt a warm glow hearing his old name from her lips. If only the Senate that was still existed. He also knew that whatever he could respond to her question should not be uttered while he felt that warm glow. So he merely gave her an inscrutable smile. 

“To what do I owe a visit from the esteemed General?” he said. 

“I thought it was time to check up on this outpost.” 

“Personally? Does the General check on all outpost bases personally?” 

“Was that the last of it?” 

“The last of the bases?” he asked, confused. 

“The last of the liquour that is not Ruge.” 

He smiled, and pulled out the bottle again, filling her glass again. Hopefully she wasn’t planning on flying herself anywhere tonight. How did she get here anyhow? He quickly glanced at the bottle that he had been drinking from. It wasn’t a hallucinogen, was it? Was she really not here at all? He reached out and touched her shoulder, to make sure there was a person there. She felt warm, human, real. He poured himself another shot, and swallowed it. 

“Ransolm, are you okay?” 

“I’m fine. I mean, I’m not fine, but it seems that there is plenty of evidence that I haven’t poisoned myself with some unknown bottle and hallucinated you, unless I’m hallucinating with all 5 senses.” 

“All five senses?” she smirked. 

“Well I can see and hear you. We’ve now just confirmed touch. And I would know your scent if I were put back in the prison cell and separated from you by 10 feet of solid phrik.” He stopped to pour and consume another drink. 

“You said five senses,” Leia said, almost taunting him, her cruel mouth pinching against laughter. Laughter at him perhaps? Laughter at the control she seemed to have over him. What was she doing there anyhow? 

“You’re a married woman,” he finally said. “And it would be obscene and ungentlemanly of me to speak any further. I’ve already said too much for a man in my current station to a woman in yours, even if you weren’t married.” 

She paused, and then let a merry laugh that made him think back to the days of nobility and social call. “My current taste is of the ruge, so it would do nothing to confirm my actual presence here. Rather, it might convince you that you are hallucinating and have broken out the bottle by yourself for yourself. See how the liquid disappears from the glass? It must be you drinking it yourself.” And she took a long slow sip out of her glass, refusing to break eye contact with him the whole time. 

“Leia,” he said, his voice cracking a little. 

“How are you, Ransolm?” 

“Alive. Coping. Helping the cause, I think. I hope. Making it through the days sober and the nights drunk. As long as I don’t flip that around, I know I’m going to make it.”

“I never had a doubt.” 

“Oh, you are such a politician. You had nothing but doubts about me from the moment we met. If you’d had fewer doubts, I’d be an active member of the resistance, rather than stationed out here where no one ever goes. That’s not to say that I don’t, as a fellow politician, understand the origins of your doubt. I don’t blame you. I know what I did, and I know that I’m damn lucky you sent in the rescue crew to keep me from my meeting with death. But when we last spoke, you said you were sure I would have been a member of the rebel alliance when you took down, well, when you did what you did. And I said that I wasn’t so sure. I just didn’t realize that you would take me at my word. Because now I am sure. The fighter helmets, the toys, might have been cooler on the Empire’s side, but most of the mistakes I’ve made in my life have been made in the pursuit of doing what I believed to be the right thing. And I know I would have done the right thing, had I been in your position. I’ve learned that about myself.” 

“And you still are choosing to do the noble thing,” she said, putting her hand on his forearm. He felt a jolt of electricity come off her skin and into his. He could feel with his whole body the truth of that statement. He would resist doing what was wrong, even when every fiber in his body screamed for her touch, to have her hand on more than just his arm. She began to gently move her thumb against his arm, and he shuddered. He hoped she hadn’t noticed that, but the pressed lipped stoppered smile indicated that she knew exactly the effect of her charms on him. 

He had always kept tight control over his fantasy life. Before he lost his position, before prison, he never indulged the base feelings that she caused in his body with any imaginings or other base indulgences of a more physical nature. He had had flashes of course, the flashes any man is susceptible to when a beautiful woman of grace and intelligence can match wits with him with such ease and royalty. However, he was also proud to say the flashes of baseness never struck him when they argued or disagreed. Never in a passion of rage. Only in the more tender moments of understanding. That’s not to say that these flashes were chaste. Only that he didn’t indulge them. 

That is, until about 3 weeks into his sentence, when he finally lost control of his thoughts and countenance. All the comportment that he had raised himself up to have slipped away alone in that cell. And though he didn’t have the strength to physically act on those mental indulgences, indulge he did. And all those fantasies started to flood back into his mind as the sensation of her thumb raised goosebumps on his arm. He was grateful that the loose unisex tunics favored in this system hide all manner of impropriety. 

He looked away from her, blushing a little, as the more obscene fantasies flipped past his eyes. She was wearing travel clothes, hardly flattering to the figure, but he found himself picturing the shift she was wearing the first time they met in his office, when he was so eager to impress her with his memorabilia, and only served to offend. 

“What’s rattling around in that head of yours?” she said, her hand moving up to start working on his upper arm. 

He opened his mouth, not knowing if he was going to kiss the smirk off her lips or speak to again inform her of her marriage vows, and instead he found a third option. He began to cry. He began to cry in a way that he hadn’t cried since he was a boy. And she wrapped her arms around him tenderly, with the physical knowledge of someone who has been someone’s safe place, be it her husband of her son, and she held him until the sobs stopped overtaking his breath. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, both too ashamed to pull away and let her see him, and too ashamed to continue to be held. He also began to worry about the way that she was now holding him, her short body slung around him in such a way that if his body’s base instinct hadn’t been squashed by the sudden outburst of emotion, it would be very obvious to her what he had been thinking before. What he was thinking about again, as he came to realize that from the point of their embrace, she had begun to kiss the side of his neck, like soft little nibbles. 

He found himself pulling away from those little electrical kisses, putting his hands on her shoulders and looking her straight in the face. “Leia, you’re married. I may have lost my job, my standing, my possessions, my sense of style, and almost lost my life, but I will not lose my morals.” 

“Ransolm. Unless I’m gravely misinformed and there’s a woman living in that small dark room with you, you wouldn’t be breaking any oaths. I’m the one who is married. And barely at that. Ever since Ben...I’m not in the same marriage that I was when we last knew each other. Han isn’t the same man. I’m not the same woman. The little that has happened here tonight is the most physical contact I’ve had in over a year. And I’m not talking about a year on a planet close to its sun. Tell me, when’s the last time you’ve touched a woman?” She looked at him with wild eyes, so clear she looked sober, which he knew she was not. 

“How drunk are you, Senator Solo?” 

“No, it’s how drunk are you, Leia? Call me Leia.” 

“How drunk are you, former Princess, former Senator, current General Leia Organa...” 

She stopped him with a kiss. 

“Sober enough to consent, but drunk enough to do what I came here to do.” 

“What did you come here to do?” 

And suddenly she was everywhere. Her lips were on his, so aggressively that he was having trouble matching her kiss for kiss, though he was willing to try. He felt her fingers starting to lift up his tunic, feeling her hands slide against his skin as he broke the kiss to remove it. He cupped her face in his hands, and got her to slow the pace of her kisses to one long indulgent connection, his tongue gently teasing against hers. 

He still had the voice in his head, the one telling him to stop, the one insisting that this isn’t what you do with a married woman, until she removed the traveling clothes and he saw her body naked for the first time. He had never been with a woman older than him before. He had always tended to seduce women younger than him, ones he could feel confident around, since he was never sure whether his abilities matched his vision of himself as a confident man of the world. Young women couldn’t tell the difference, and he had gotten it into his head that a woman his age or older couldn’t compare visually to these slight women. But the sight of Leia naked literally brought him to his knees. 

“Oh don’t be melodramatic,” she said, laughing. “I never feel less like royalty than I do when I’m disrobed.”

“I’m not kneeling because you’re royalty.”

“Are you saying you fell to your knees from my beauty?” 

“I, well, you see...” 

“Melodrama,” she laughed. “Pure melodrama.” 

“I don’t mean to offend,” he said, smiling. “I only mean to worship the image that kept me alive in a solitary prison.” 

“Don’t worship my image. A princess or a senator has an image. I’m a general now. Don’t bother worshiping my image. I’m inviting you to worship my body.” 

“Taste,” he said. 

“What?” 

“The fifth sense was taste. I still need to prove you’re not a hallucination. I would be honored if you would disrobe completely, and get in my sad little bed in my sad little cupboard room and allow me to prove you are real by letting me taste every part of you.” 

She smiled, she reached down to help him stand, and she lead him off to the room, shedding what was left of her clothing as they passed through the doorway. 

 

_A few years later..._

 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, pushing her back into his firm chest and wrapping his arms further around her. 

“But Leia, he was your husband. You can’t pretend that you can just go forward knowing that...”

“Of course I can. You’re where I go to get away from these feelings. You’re my holiday. This sad dark world and this depressing room is my sanctuary from everything my life has become. Please don’t push me to talk about it. I’ve barely seen him since that day, since that day I first came here. He’s not even fighting for the cause. He’s a smuggler. He was roped into helping the cause, but only in an attempt to get back that ship he always loved more than he loved me. I don’t need to deal with it because there’s nothing to deal with. Please just...can we...can you just touch me and make me forget everything?” 

She took his hands, and tried to place them strategically on her body, tried to distract him from petty emotions. 

He unwrapped his arms from her body and lay on his back. “Leia, I’m a human being. Stop using me to distract yourself from what you feel. I’m not yours for the using.” 

“No, but you were probably right way back when you said that my lineage made me untrustworthy. Do you remember that you thought that? Because the irony is that I came to you at all that day. But now I know that you were right all along. My father murdered everyone I had ever loved in one decisive action. He cut off my brother’s hand. My father ruined everything that he touched. My brother has been missing for years. That my son would go to the dark side and murder his father, my estranged husband...why should that shock me? It didn’t shock Han. He blamed my genetics when Ben first went wrong,” she said, and she sat up so she could look him directly in the eyes. “That fight was what pushed me away from him, pushed me into your arms. Into the arms of the man who agreed that Darth Vader being my father was a reflection of my character.” 

“I haven’t thought that in years. I don’t think that at all. I was wrong to ever think that.” 

“No you weren’t. Evil runs inside of me. I can do the best I can, but it’s a good thing we’ve passed the days of our species fertility. You wouldn’t want any child I could give you.” 

“Then it’s a good thing that you’re a gorgeous sexy vibrant woman past the point of her fertility. I love making love to you. And I know better than to try to change your mind about anything. I can’t believe I tried to talk you out of my bed. You were in charge. You are in charge. You will always be in charge. In war, in bed, and in my heart.”

“Let’s not talk about that.” 

“What, about the fact that I’m in love with you? About the fact that I don’t care whether you’re uncontrollably genetically evil or not, recognizing all the irony in that fact. That all I want is to get to be inside of your intricate complicated mind.” 

“Inside?” 

“And...other things,” he smiles a wicked smile, but then refocuses. “And I’m sorry for your loss, but you’re not allowed to use that loss to push me away. I was once in a place where I didn’t care whether you were using me or not. But I’m in a better place now. I understand the goals of the resistance, and I’m actually helping the cause in what I do here.” 

“Come back with me. I want you to take a more active roll in the resistance.”

“Oh thank the universe. Can we leave now?” 

“Not just now,” she said, stroking his hip bone with her hand. 

“But where would I live if I came back with you?” he asked, with a patrician coyness she hadn’t heard in years. 

She silenced him with a kiss. 

 

 


End file.
